Archives

Mar092011

For the Final Time, Wheels Stop

And just like this, space shuttle Discovery became a museum piece moments before noon EST today:



I don’t have much more to say than I’ve already said many times — I think the space shuttles are magnificent machines that once represented all my dreams for the future, and I’m genuinely sad to see their era coming to an end. Especially as I have my days when I think this just may be the proverbial it for manned spaceflight by Americans. Oh, sure, we’ll keep hitching rides to the ISS on Russian ships for a few more years, and companies like SpaceX are promising some exciting things, but I can’t help feeling like the day of the Space Transportation System — that’d be the shuttle to you and me — isn’t the only one that’s passing. The Space Age that began in the 1950s and always seemed like such a given as I was growing up, such a well-loved and everlasting institution, seems to be winding down, too. There are partisan types who are quick to blame the situation on President Obama because he’s the one who axed the Constellation program that was supposed to replace the shuttle, but it wasn’t his fault. It’s been coming for years. Decades, maybe. We are diminishing, as a culture. We lost our nerve somewhere along the way, and our drive and our curiosity went with it. The human race will spread out into the system one of these days, but I no longer have faith that Americans will be leading the way.

But this also is something I’ve said before. For today, let’s just focus on Discovery and her incredible legacy. She is the most-traveled of the shuttle fleet, clocking up a whopping 365 days in space over 39 missions across a 27-year operational lifespan. She’s circled the Earth 5,830 times for a grand total of 148, 221, 675 miles traversed while in orbit. And as Commander Steve Lindsay noted in his remarks on the Kennedy Space Center runway this afternoon, with his ship standing proudly on the tarmac behind him, she came home today as perfect as on her very first flight.

Discovery‘s next journey will be a comparative hop of only 750 miles, from Kennedy to Washington, DC, where she will become a permanent resident of the Smithsonian alongside her sister ship, the prototype Enterprise. My understanding is that the two spaceplanes will be parked nose to nose, representing the beginning and the end of the program. One day, I intend to stand in front of that exhibit. And I’m willing to bet my eyes will fill with tears for what was, and what I always thought would be…

spacer
Mar092011

Things Are Looking a Little Different Around Here…

Hey, kids, you may have noticed that there’ve been a few changes to Simple Tricks and Nonsense. My webmaster Jack finally found the time to do that long-awaited upgrade on my blogging platform, so I’m now running MovableType v.5 (I was on 3-point-something before). The most immediate differences are a new back-end interface for me (which I’m still trying to sort out), and the rather minimalistic new aesthetic for you folks on the other side of the screen. I intend to do some tinkering over the next days, trying to get the hang of the new software and tweaking a few things, so don’t be alarmed if you see content coming and going, or rearranging itself. (I need to do something with these sidebars, if I can figure out how; I want my calendar back, and I can’t imagine that tag cloud thingie ever having much utility, and I’m even toying with getting rid of the categories, if I can figure out how.)

But the thing I imagine my Loyal Readers will be most interested in and excited by is the return of… commenting!  Yes, once again we can make this place a virtual salon of witticisms and fascinating back-and-forth… with one difference from before: you’ve now got to register in order to prove yourself real enough to talk to me, and not a worthless golmonging spambot. I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure of how this registration process is supposed to work, although the system apparently accepts logins from a variety of blogging platforms and web portals. So if you’ve got a Google or a Yahoo or a LiveJournal identity, those things all ought to work here to get you into the commenting queue. Anyhow, give it a try and if you have problems, shoot me an email at jason at jasonbennion.com, and I’ll see if I can figure out what’s wrong. I hope this won’t prove to be an inconvenience for anyone, but I’m practically bouncing in my office chair for the joy of not having to deal with any more bloody spam…

spacer
Mar072011

To Boldy Go… and Do…

Well, that was a fast mission… STS-133 is already winding down, just as I was getting used to the idea. Discovery undocked from the International Space Station early this morning and is now pulling away a little more with each orbit, heading for a planned Wednesday landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It leaves behind a completed ISS, the largest object mankind has ever put up there in the black. It’s not exactly the elegant wheel-shaped space station of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, but it is nonetheless an incredible achievement. I suspect — I hope — that 75 years from now, the building of orbiting structures will have advanced enough and become common enough that people will marvel at the story of the ISS, amazed that we could have accomplished something so monumental using such primitive technology, just as we now look back and admire the men of the 1930s who constructed Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge with little more than sweat and sheer determination. Of course, that’s assuming that the ISS isn’t the last big thing we do up there before we run out of everything and descend into a new feudalism. But I’m trying to be positive.

Getting back to Discovery, I don’t know if it’s because this is her final mission, or if I’m just paying more attention because it’s her final mission, but there is really an amazing plethora of videos — or should that be a plethora of amazing videos? — from STS-133 floating around the InterWebs. I think I mentioned the other day how really, shockingly different it is today than it was even just a few years ago, when amateur movie-makers had no efficient way to share their work and NASA only released a few minutes of their footage, which the news media promptly cut down to about 15 seconds because we had to get back to the day’s sports scores or some damn thing. As much as I gripe about the 21st century, I have to admit that YouTube is a boon for geeks like me. And tonight I’m taking advantage of that boon to gather here on Simple Tricks a few of my favorite video clips from the past two weeks… enjoy!

Continue Reading…

spacer
Mar062011

Desert Empire

Here’s another entry that probably won’t be of much interest to anyone except me and possibly those readers who grew up in Utah or are otherwise familiar with the place, but I’ve been utterly enchanted by this find and want to share it with somebody. It’s a 30-minute film called Desert Empire, which I stumbled across over on the Internet Archive — a fascinating repository of all kinds of material that doesn’t quite fit the YouTube paradigm, and isn’t ever going to see a DVD release, but is still worth preserving in some fashion. The film is a 1948 travelogue in which two lovely ladies journey by train through my very own home state of Utah, stopping in such places as Arches National Park (then known as Arches National Monument), Provo City, Bingham Canyon, the original Saltair pavilion at the Great Salt Lake, and of course, Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The voiceover narration is pretty outrageous even by the charmingly effusive standards of the 1940s, but the visuals are incredible. It’s fascinating to see very familiar places as they used to be, back when this state’s entire population was probably less than the modern-day citizenry of metro Salt Lake, and it’s even more fascinating to see how little some of these places have changed in 60 years.
Anyhow, if your curiosity is even remotely piqued, the film appears in three parts below the fold. I’ll be providing a few little observations on the things that struck me about each segment…

Continue Reading…

spacer
Mar032011

2009 Media Wrap-Up

Yeah, I know, I’m a little late with this one. Usher, would you please show that heckler to the door? Thanks. I’ll wait until he’s… oh, okay, good now we can talk.

Last night, I was trying to look something up when I realized that I never got around to doing my customary overview of the books, movies, and home video I enjoyed in 2009. I’ve managed to hit every other year since 2005, but somehow ’09 got away from me. Well, anyone who knows me knows I can’t tolerate that sort of inconsistency! Luckily, I was able to find my handwritten notes for that year — yes, I keep notes about these things — so I’ve now been able to put together the official Simple Tricks and Nonsense 2009 Media Wrap-Up.

(I realize, of course, that this information is likely of very little interest to anyone but myself. I’m only going to the trouble of making a blog entry at this late date for my own records, and to satisfy my OCD. Thanks for your understanding. If you’re vacillating about whether to read on, it might help you to know that I’m not going to bother with any commentary on this one, it’ll just be lists of titles.)

Continue Reading…

spacer
Mar032011

AutoRama: How Far We’ve Come

During my glorious teenage years back in the Awesome ’80s, the annual AutoRama car show was a must-attend event for every red-blooded young male in the valley. No, not because of the cars, although they were neat enough — seeing ZZ Top’s Eliminator hot rod in the flesh, er, steel was a real treat, for example — but because the show afforded the opportunity to bask in the presence of honest-to-glory Playboy Playmates. Yes, for only the price of admission plus a small additional autograph fee, any pimple-faced, scrubby-mustached, mullet-wearing doofus could have the honor of standing in a line that sometimes stretched back for a couple of hours, all to experience less than 30 seconds of facetime with a paragon of feminine pulchritude you couldn’t actually go out with in a million years. Oh, and you got a signed picture, too. And occasionally a Playmate who would pose for a photo with you, although the shot never seemed to turn out because your friend with the camera had shaky hands. But hey, you could at least point at the blurry, vaguely humanoid shape and tell people who it was, and remember the prickle of flopsweat blossoming under your arms as she slipped her arm across the top of your shoulders.

Yes, those were the days.

I haven’t been to an AutoRama in decades, but there’s one coming up this weekend, and just for kicks I thought I’d have a look at the schedule to see if anything — or anyone — interesting is going to be there. The results were… disappointing. No Playmates. Instead, we’ve got Jeanette McCurdy, a teenaged actress from a cable-TV kid’s show called iCarly, and a fisherman from that reality series The Deadliest Catch.

Sigh. Is there any doubt America is a society in decline?

spacer
Mar022011

Five-by-Five TV Meme, Preceded by a Bit of Ranting

I struggled all last week to compose one of my occasional political cris de couer, this one motivated by the nonsense currently going on in Wisconsin. If you’ve been in a cave for the last month — and I know at least one of my Loyal Readers whose circumstances could be described as such — Wisconsin’s Republican governor is using a budgetary crisis, which he seems to have engineered himself, as a pretense to try and force his state’s public-sector labor unions into giving up their collective bargaining rights. In shorter words, he’s union-busting. But he’s not busting all the public-sector unions. No, he’s only after the ones whose members tend to vote Democratic. The Republican-leaning police and firefighter unions are safe. Which means this whole exercise is transparently partisan and blatantly ideological. I’m not interested in debating the pros and cons of unions — Kevin Drum pretty much sums up my opinion here, and says it better than I could anyhow — but the more unsavory political truth of the Wisconsin deal makes me mad. It is only the most obvious example of how Republicans nationwide are trying to take advantage of a shaky economy to ram through a radical right-wing social agenda that they haven’t managed to accomplish in decades of trying. In other words, they’re trying to kill things Republicans hate on principle anyway, while saying they have to do it to get the economy going.

Bullshit.

Here’s the thing: if you really care about cutting the deficit, then you’ve got to be willing to at least consider letting the Bush tax cuts expire. The tax rates during the Clinton years were hardly onerous — they were lower than the taxes in the prosperous 1950s — and they’d go a long ways toward balancing the books. And you also ought to be trying to find a way to convince the wealthy — who seem to think they’re above paying taxes — that they are still part of this country, even if they live behind locked gates, and it’s immoral of them not to contribute to the common good. Oh, and you’d get serious about making corporations pay their fair share too. And while I’m pipe-dreaming anyhow, how about re-regulating the financial industry that caused this mess anyhow? And sending a few CEOs to jail? Or at least taking their solid-gold parachutes away from them and giving the money to the employees who got laid off to bolster the stockholders’ dividends last quarter… but noooo, that’s class warfare and we can’t have that. Not unless it’s being waged on the middle-class people who actually do the work in this country and are fast on their way to becoming vassals of a new feudalism. The sad thing is, a lot of them seem to actually want that…

Yeah, anyhow that’s the gist of what I’ve been trying to write, but the damn thing just hasn’t wanted to come together in a satisfying way, so tonight I decided “Screw it, let’s do a nice harmless meme.” And as fate would have it, SamuraiFrog recently provided one…

Continue Reading…

spacer
Feb242011

Discovery’s Final Flight Begins

With her solid rocket boosters burning a brilliant orange against a steel-blue late-afternoon sky, the space shuttle Discovery lifted off today on her final voyage before retirement. Discovery is the workhorse of the shuttle fleet with 38 prior missions to her credit, including the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, the final docking mission with the old Russian station Mir, and a return to space for Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. Discovery was also the first shuttle to fly again after both the Challenger and Columbia disasters. I think it’s fair to say that the good ship Discovery is something special among the shuttle fleet.

The current mission, designated STS-133 in NASA-speak, is yet another trip to the International Space Station where Discovery will deliver the inelegantly named Permanent Multipurpose Module and various supplies and spare parts. Also along for the ride is a humanoid robot called Robonaut 2, or R2 for short, which is intended to help engineers study how such robots function in space. Hopefully, R2 will someday assist the station’s crew with repair work and scientific experiments. (R2 is actually pretty interesting; it has highly dexterous human-shaped hands and looks like something out of one of our favorite sci-fi movies. No, not Star Wars… actually this thing reminds me more of the sentry robots from The Black Hole, minus the double-barreled laser guns and the permanent bad attitudes.)

One interesting trivia note for this flight: one of the mission specialists, astronaut Steve Bowen, flew on Atlantis last May during the STS-132 mission, making him the first astronaut ever to fly back-to-back missions. (This wasn’t exactly planned; it came about because he had to replace a guy who was injured in a bicycle accident.)

If anyone’s interested, the official NASA video of this picture-perfect launch, from main-engine start to external fuel-tank separation, is below the fold:

Continue Reading…

spacer
Feb212011

In Case Anyone Needs a Priest…

…I’m available.

generate_cert.php

Weddings, mitzvahs, whatever, man. Of course, whatever you want will have to wait until I finish my cocktail. Why don’t you pull up a chair and have one with me? Just take it easy, man.

Dudeism. I finally found a religion I can hang with…

spacer
Feb182011

Friday Evening Videos: “Hold On”

Oh, what the hell… since I brought it up earlier, here’s the video for Wilson Phillips’ number-one smash hit, “Hold On”:

Pretty silly stuff, I know… so sweet and earnest and self-helpy. So “just between us, girlfriend.” So very 1990. (This will probably sound weird, but the music of the ’90s sounds far more dated to my ear than the music of the Awesome ’80s, which has achieved a sort of timeless quality, at least in my opinion). But like I said in the previous entry, it’s harmless stuff, and this song in particular has a catchy melody. I always liked it back in the day.
A couple observations:

  • My god, these three girls all look so young. I don’t remember them seeming all that young back in 1990. If you scrubbed off the make-up and put them in purple plastic aprons, they could’ve been working behind the candy counter at the theater…
  • I wonder if all the mountaintop helicopter footage was inspired at all by Sammy Hagar’s “Give to Live” video, which has a similar sequence. Or maybe in the late ’80s/early ’90s, it just seemed like a mountaintop was the best place to discuss this heavy “change your attitude, change your life” stuff.
  • I remember how Carnie Wilson, the heavier of the two redheads, the one with the short, straight hair, took a lot of crap when Wilson Phillips was still extant for being “the fat one.” She doesn’t look all that big to me here; in fact, I think she’s quite attractive. Weird how your perspective on such things changes over time. (Of course, it probably helps that she really did become fat in later years, and she did it all in the public eye, so I’m most likely comparing her 1990 self against what she later became.)
  • Chynna Phillips, the blond who’s doing the lead in this video, looks so much like her mother that it’s kinda spooky.
  • And finally, for the record, my favorite of the group was always Wendy Wilson, the one with the curly red hair. She’s the prettiest in my eye, and that combination of a sundress with boots is still tres sexy…

And on that note, let’s get this holiday weekend started, shall we?

spacer